I have been rolling my eyes at a lot of the \u201cICE will be the spearpoint of the new Trumpian reich\u201d stuff coming out of the left recently but this\u2026 is actually something worth keeping an eye on.
\u201cThe Government\u201d is not a monolithic whole but a semi-integrated collection of squabbling feifdoms and \u201cThe FBI is the agency in charge of federal domestic policing/repression\u201d is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. At various points in American history the equivalent role\u2019s been filled by the US Marshals, the US Postal Inspection Service, Treasury Department agents - the Secret Service and \u201crevenuers\u201d presaging the modern BATF. For a while in the Gilded Age it was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency acting directly under leading capitalists with the government cut out of the loop entirely.
The FBI\u2019s 20th century preeminence was not foreordained but a consequence of bureaucratic maneuvering in reaction to specific moments and events \u2013 the anarchist wave of the early 1900s; WWI; the First Red Scare; Prohibition; the early automobile-era motorized bandit gangs; the Kansas City Massacre (before which the FBI didn\u2019t carry guns or make arrests); WWII; the rise of Hollywood (and J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s cooption of same); the Second Red Scare; COINTELPRO; RFK\u2019s anti-Mafia crusade and the wrap-up of white ethnic urban machine politics; Cold War cocaine \u201880s Miami; the 1993 Waco seige (starting as a backfired ATF attempt at profile-raising and positioning in the face of Clinton-era budget trimming).
And now, with the FBI and the old-line three letter agencies at loggerheads with the elected executive and his party in Congress, a young upstart agency known for its enthusiastic loyalty to said executive, in the middle of a massive staffing-up, bids to expand its capabilities and portfolio\u2026
that\u2019s exactly the scenario under which things might change